Who's to say we wouldn't fall for a Rasputin?

The Russian word “rasputnik” means debauchee. This so irritated the Russian holy man, Grigory Rasputin, that he persuaded Tsar Nicholas II to let him change his name by law. Just before Christmas 1906, he became Rasputin Novy, which means “New Rasputin”. Rasputin later claimed that this name was bestowed on him by the Tsar’s young heir, Alexis. The boy had haemophilia, and it was Rasputin’s supposedly mystical capacity to staunch its effects which gave him such a hold over the imperial couple.

But, as with the Labour Party in modern times, adding the word “new” did not solve every problem. Whatever the etymology, Rasputin was indeed a debauchee, and remained so to his atrocious end. Shortly before his murder, for example, he had what Frances Welch calls “a late night session more or less running into a long lunch” in which he drank 12 bottles of madeira before passing out. Although he had mesmerising eyes, he was not physically prepossessing: “Following years of use as a napkin, his straggling beard was festooned with decaying food.”

His love of the new expressed itself in his addiction to the telephone. He used to make nuisance calls, vet women for appointments and, with a friend singing a medley of songs down the line, dance “in squats, twirls and stamps”, with the receiver in his hand. He spoke frequently to the Tsarina. The phone in her bedroom stood under a portrait of Marie-Antoinette.

Although disapproved of by the Church authorities, Rasputin acquired huge status as a holy man which he readily exploited with what he called “the little ladies”. He much disliked elderly women, shouting, “Get away, you old carcass!” Young ones had readier access. They would be invited to soap him all over in bath-houses (“Take your clothes off and wash the muzhik [peasant]”). As their spiritual “pilot”, he would incite them into ecstatic dancing and then seduce as many as possible with the cry “Sin is salvation!” E J Dillon, this newspaper’s correspondent, wrote, deadpan: “The simple souls who gathered around him as their saviour were amazed at the ease with which they would qualify for the Kingdom of Heaven.”

One of the few women with whom Rasputin did not sleep was the Tsarina herself. She was pure, and faithful to her husband. Her unwavering love for the man she always referred to as “Our Friend” was spiritual. Unfortunately, many chose to believe otherwise. Russia, by the time Rasputin had risen to prominence, had a fledgling parliamentary democracy, but the Tsar had never really forsworn absolute power, and was constantly encouraged by his wife to use it. As a result, Rasputin could increasingly employ his favour with the imperial family to affect appointments in church and state, and even the conduct of the First World War, in which Russia was fighting Germany. Since the Tsarina herself was German, people were suspicious of her. Rasputin’s influence was widely seen as disastrous. Without him, wrote Kerensky, the leader of the first of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, “there would have been no Lenin”. When the imperial family were murdered by the Bolsheviks, the Tsarina and four young Grand Duchesses were found to be wearing amulets containing miniature portraits of “Our Friend”.

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Frances Welch tells this extraordinary story in the right, clear, sceptical tone. It is subtitled “A Short Life” and is published by Short Books. The brevity works. Two hundred pages is roughly what one wants about this charlatan who took large sums for organising the miraculous reappearance of Jesus Christ and ordered his crown of thorns from the local florist. Frances Welch is a well-known expert on the period. She walks sure-footedly round the corridors of Tsarskoye Selo and by the icy banks of the river Neva in St Petersburg into which the body of the murdered Rasputin was finally dropped. The book is a delight to read, if horror can be delightful.

One can see why the Romanovs – so often flattered, lied to and conspired against – turned to a man who cut through all social norms. Frances Welch says that the Tsar used to make “the same grimace when saying 'intelligentsia’ as when he said 'syphilis’.” He had the romantic Russian belief that peasants were wise and had a special, holy channel to the truth. The Siberian muzhik Rasputin said things outright: even his prophecies (“She will recover but she will always be a cripple”) had a baldness about them that stood out against the circumlocutions of the court. Perhaps the traditional idea that the Tsar was closer to the poor than were the ruling elites below him had a grain of truth.

Besides, it is too convenient for everyone else to argue that the regime collapsed because of one man’s sorcery. The causes were much wider and deeper, and one gets no sense that the men who killed Rasputin were any more selfless than their victim. His death was as much part of court intrigue as was his rise. By the time one gets to the author’s gripping account of his murder, one finds oneself urging him on as he resists the effects of poison and fights his assailants furiously though shot at point-blank range.

We think we would not fall for Rasputin today. True, we would not fall for him in that particular form. But we have our own versions. Look how the late Jimmy Savile was fawned on because of his wacky celebrity and his devotion to charity. He was knighted, had lunch at Chequers and claimed to be helping reconcile Charles and Diana. Only after his death was it widely suggested that he might have sexually assaulted several hundred young people, of both sexes.